I am looking for a job in China and have received offers in several cities from Best Learning English. Their deal seems pretty good- 10,000, free housing in Dalian or 3,000 housing allowance in Beijing, 36 hours a week work time.

I've looked around these forums enough to know to be very wary about jobs from Chinese language schools, but I don't want to wait for university season, because my contract in Korea is coming to an end soon.

Has anyone heard anything about Best Learning English? I asked for contact emails from current teachers, they say they have fifty, so I'm surprised I haven't been able to find anything about them on these forums.

Well, it was much better than the offers I got from Disney Or EF (45 hours for 12500 without housing allowance). I have been looking less than a week so those r all I have to compare it to. Many schools require some form of tesol, which I am considering getting.

The holidays are paid actually, and there are 20 teaching hours with overtime if I go above. From what I have seen on this forum, I'm not positive that Chinese language schools follow through on anything.

What should I be aiming for? I want to live in dalian or a similarly sized city. I have served 3 years in Korea.

Well, it was much better than the offers I got from Disney Or EF (45 hours for 12500 without housing allowance). I have been looking less than a week so those r all I have to compare it to. Many schools require some form of tesol, which I am considering getting.

The holidays are paid actually, and there are 20 teaching hours with overtime if I go above. From what I have seen on this forum, I'm not positive that Chinese language schools follow through on anything.

What should I be aiming for? I want to live in dalian or a similarly sized city. I have served 3 years in Korea.

I've been looking at the same school here in Beijing where they have 6 locations (25 in all of China). Their pay scale is tiered to your credentials--how many other schools do that. Overall their pay and benefits package is better than Disney's and most other similar operations.

Seems they're part of this rapidly expanding CLIL wave here in China (Content (or subject) Language Integrated Learning). They use McGraw Hill textbooks in training centres to teach kids English through math and science,etc.

CLIL is worthy of a topic all itself which I think I'll start. I've already subbed in one such school with such courseware and interviewed at others. Overall, I think it's a lot of hype but even less learner-focused than traditional oral English instrucition at places like EF, Kid Kastle, Disney Aston, etc. It sounds like ESP for kids. In one such math class, I could hardly understand a child's English--extremely poor pronunciation but quite fluent otherwise.

PM me if you want details. Kelly, their recruiter will Skype interveiw me later today.

Last edited by LongShiKong on Sun Oct 21, 2012 4:24 am; edited 1 time in total

I think the fact that they have included free housing into the contract would seal the deal for most. At EF and Disney, you're working 40 hours minimum and sometimes overtime when housing is NOT included. 36 hours and 10,000 might not be too sweet of a contract, but included housing would make up for it. Also, by them using McGraw-Hill shows that they are top-notch and are very serious about learning.

Since this topic is coming up again, I thought I should follow up. The school seemed like an OK choice but very disorganized and new. There was virtually nothing on the internet about them.

The teachers I talked to who currently worked there said that their lesson plans were very good but management was very last-minute and chaotic. This is normal in Korea and probably China as well.

What ultimately led me to not taking the job was that they could not answer my questions well, needing to consult with underlings, and that they couldn't give me a current teacher in Dalian to interview.

And despite the negative first response, for Dalian it's not a bad position compared to most of what I've seen. Dalian was my preferred city but Liaoning province recently made it more difficult for teachers to get a Z-visa from Hong Kong, which was my preference.

There wasn't anything about Longman Schools or Scholastic either until I wrote about them and those schools have been around for years with dozens of locations. The growing number of economic refugees and backpackers doing gap years aren't the ones to read or post on TEFL-related forums such as this. With the exception of one or 2 posters, the Beijinger's forum for English teaching reads like a newbie forum.

[quote=natjones"]...they could not answer my questions well, needing to consult with underlings,...[/quote]

The same happened to me. I think that's because their recruiter hasn't much teaching experience. Given their rapid expansion over their 4 yr history, you can expect that. The fact they actually want uni transcripts impresses me? They might actually want to contact my references.